Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Peter Norris Dupas: The Ordinary Monster

Ordinary Monster, Ordinary Beginning

Peter Norris Dupas

Peter Dupas was a predatory sex
monster of the worst kind: A cruel and calculating fiend who
meticulously went about his depravity and could then melt into a crowd
in a heartbeat. A man so ordinary and inconspicuous that it was almost
impossible to believe that he could commit such atrocities. That is
the way his victims saw him and, time and again, they allowed him into
their company.

He left those who survived so
traumatized that some could never again go to sleep with the light off
or walk down their own hallway unaccompanied. No sooner was Peter Dupas
out of jail than he would re-offend, each time worse than the last,
until he killed and was finally locked away, where he would never be
allowed to hurt anyone again.

Map of Australia with Melbourne Locator

Born into a loving home in Sydney on
July 6, 1953, Peter Norris Dupas was the youngest of three children
and, as an infant, moved with his family to Melbourne, where he grew up
in the Frankston and Mount Waverley areas. Peter’s brother and sister
were many years older than he and his parents who were old enough to be
his grandparents, treated him like an only child. He claimed later
that he was a spoiled child, made to feel inadequate by his
overprotective mother and perfectionist father.

Teased by the other kids at school
because he was a slow learner and prone to be overweight — his nickname
was Pugsley, after the boy in the TV show “The Addams Family” — Dupas
grew up as the class dunce and repeated Form 1. At age 15, Dupas
embarked on his criminal career in a fashion that would become his
trademark — attacking women with a knife.

Pugsley Addams

On October 3, 1968, while wearing
his school uniform, Dupas went to the house next door and asked his
friendly 27-year-old neighbor, who was nursing her five-week-old baby,
if he could borrow a sharp knife so he could peel some potatoes. As the
woman commented on what a good boy he was for helping his mother with
the cooking, he lunged at her with the knife and stabbed her in the
stomach without saying a word.

“He knocked me down onto the floor and
fell on top of me,” the woman told the police. “He kept on stabbing me
with the knife and I kept trying to ward him off. I felt the knife cut
into my hands, mainly my right hand, my face and my neck.

“I was holding on to the knife at one
stage trying to break the blade. I was lying on my back and he was
sitting on top of me. He said, ‘It’s too late, I can’t stop now,
they’ll lock me up.’”

After covering her mouth with his hand
and repeatedly bashing the woman’s head on the floor, Dupas stopped as
abruptly as he had begun. He told police he didn’t know why he had
attacked his neighbor and that he would never intentionally hurt
anyone.

“I can remember having the knife in my hand,” Dupas told police. “I must have been trying to kill her or something.”

Larundel Hospital

The teenage assailant was taken to
Larundel Hospital for psychiatric assessment. It was concluded in court
that he was “caught in an emotional conflict between the need to
conform to the expectations of his parents and the unconscious urges to
express his aggression and his developing masculinity.” Dupas was put
on 18 months’ probation and told to undergo psychiatric treatment.

“An evil, cold baby-faced liar”

Peter Norris Dupas

During form 5, he left the horrors
of school and took up an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner at
General Electric in nearby Notting Hill. As is the case with a lot of
socially unacceptable serial sex offenders who get their kicks out of
dominating and dehumanizing defenseless women, while doing his
apprenticeship Dupas, applied to join the police force so he could
exert his authority legally. But he was rejected for being 1cm too
short.

On March 10, 1972, a man chased and
caught 19-year-old Dupas after finding him peeping through the bathroom
window at his wife in the shower. On November 15, 1973, Dupas was
interviewed by police after a motorist reported that he had repeatedly
driven alongside the complainant’s car, staring and smiling at his
12-year-old daughter.

Two weeks later, detectives from nearby
Nunawading arrested and charged Dupas with the rape of a married woman
three weeks earlier on November 5, 1973. They alleged that Dupas had
asked his victim for help claiming his car had broken down outside her
home. While the woman was looking for a screwdriver, Dupas hid in the
house then threatened the woman and her 18-month-old baby with a knife
before raping her.

Police alleged that in the two weeks
before he was picked up, Dupas had tricked his way into two homes with
the same ruse, but had left without assaulting either woman. He stole
money from the first house and left, and fled from the second when the
woman told him her husband was on the way home and would be there any
minute.

Even in those early days, arresting
detectives saw the potential danger in Dupas and the leader of the
investigation, Senior Sergeant Ian Armstrong, described him to reporters
as “an evil, cold, baby-faced liar who would possibly cause the death
of one of his victims if he wasn’t straightened out.”

The investigating detectives discovered
that Dupas was a consummate liar and a frustrating interview subject,
as even in the face of overwhelming evidence he would deny everything.
Then he would break down, and just when it looked as though he was
about to make a confession, he would straighten himself up and deny
everything again and they would have to go back and start again from
the beginning.

Detectives also discovered that Dupas
was no ordinary rapist who chose his victims at random. He was
organized to the point where he had everything worked out down to the
last detail. He had pre-chosen his victim(s) and went about his
business in a very cold and calculated fashion, remaining calm at all
times, even when arrested.

“He was a cool, cunning liar,” Detective
Armstrong told reporters. “You’d look at him and think, ‘Could he be
this callous, this dangerous? But I knew this guy would be a danger…you
could smell it.’”

After being charged with rape and
released on bail, Dupas was remanded to Mont Park psychiatric hospital,
where he was allowed to come and go as he pleased. While still
attending Mont Park, Dupas was arrested for a series of incidents at
nearby Rosebud Beach.

He was seen on at least three occasions
entering a female toilet and shower block and watching girls showering
before he was trapped in a police stakeout. Dupas was taken back to
Mont Park and admitted as a voluntary patient, where he stayed put from
January 8 to February 22, 1974.

Dupas Gets the Urge

Charged with loitering with intent and
offensive behavior over the Rosebud allegations, the court heard that
while psychiatrists at Mont Park were unable to find any gross
psychiatric disorders with the 21-year-old Dupas, they did not exclude
the possibility of personality problems for him in the future. Dupas
was fined $140.

Six months later, at his sentencing for
the Nunawading rape of the married woman on November 5, 1973, the judge
was not so lenient. County Court Judge John Leckie didn’t hold back as
he berated Dupas for what he described as one of the most appalling
rapes that could possibly be imagined.

“You raped a young married woman who was
previously unknown to you in her own home and on her own bed,” he told
the prisoner. “You invaded the sanctity of her home by a false story
about your car breaking down. You threatened her with a knife, you tied
her up with a cord, you struck her when she tried to resist and, worst
of all, you threatened to harm her baby when she tried to resist.

“Whilst accepting that you are
psychologically disturbed,” Judge Leckie said, “I believe you were
fully responsible for your actions.”

And in what would be a fatally accurate
prediction, Dr Allen Bartholomew, one of Australia’s most experienced
forensic psychiatrists, who had examined Dupas while he was in custody,
told the court, “I am reasonably certain that this youth has a serious
psycho-sexual problem, that he is using the technique of denial as a
coping device and he is to be seen as potentially dangerous.”

Judge Leckie sentenced Dupas to nine years in jail with a non-parole period of five years.

Jail and attempts at rehabilitation
obviously had no affect on Peter Dupas and a little more than two
months after his release on September 4, 1979, after serving five years
and eight months, he attacked four women over a 10-day period, leaving
them psychologically damaged for the rest of their lives. This time he
was equipped with what would become his trademark — a knife and a
balaclava.

Balaclava facemask

Dupas raped his first victim in a
Frankston public toilet block. His next three victims escaped, but one,
an elderly woman, was stabbed in the chest as she offered as much
resistance as she could muster in an attempt to escape. His attempt at
rape foiled, Dupas bolted. The woman told police that as she started
getting to her feet after her assailant had run away, she realized that
blood was pouring from the left side of her chest. She had been
stabbed.

When picked up by police, he confessed
to all of the attacks, said that he was glad that he had been caught,
and said that he had fled from the last two attempted assaults when the
women started screaming. His only explanation for the attacks was that
he “gets the urge.”

Dupas told arresting officers in a
recorded interview, “It just comes over me. I can’t help myself. I have
had this problem for about six years. It all started again about a
year ago. I don’t know if it was because me (sic) girlfriend left me or
what it is. I just find it hard to mix with people and I haven’t many
friends. I just don’t know what to say.”

Dupas was charged with rape, three
counts of assault with intent to rape, malicious wounding, indecent
assault and assault with intent to rob. Judge Leo Lazarus presided over
the case, and when Dupas was found guilty on all counts, the judge
shocked the prosecution by handing down what they considered a meager
6½-year sentence with, a five-year non-parole period, despite the fact
that it was Dupas’ second time around for rape and he was in on
considerably more charges than his previous conviction.

A Loaded Time Bomb

Four days after he was released on
February 27, 1985, after serving five years and three months, Dupas
raped a 21-year-old receptionist as she lay sunbathing at Blairgowrie
back beach. Two men the distraught victim had asked for help caught
Dupas as he walking along a road away from the beach after he had
misplaced his car.

Dupas could offer no explanation for his
behavior, only that he was enjoying himself on the beach having an
easy day “laying back” when he saw the woman and couldn’t help himself.
Dupas said that he was sorry for the attack, that everyone had assured
him that he was all right now and that all he wanted to do was to live
a normal life.

Dupas also couldn’t help police with
their inquiries into the murder 16 days earlier — while he was on
temporary leave from prison — of sunbather and mother of four, Helen
McMahon, who was beaten to death in the sand dunes at Rye back beach,
4km away.

Once again in court for rape, Dupas was
not to be as fortunate as he had been with the benevolent Judge Leo
Lazarus. Instead, he had to again confront Judge John Leckie, the same
judge who had verbally caned him before sentencing him to five years
jail on the Nunawading rape 11½ years earlier. To add to Dupas’ woes,
in the interim, Judge Leckie had been critical of the previous lenient
sentence handed down by Judge Lazarus, saying it was “inadequate.”

Judge Leckie told the court that Judge
Lazarus’s attempt to rehabilitate Dupas five years earlier had “failed
miserably” and showed no compassion to the prisoner as he described
Dupas as “walking around with a loaded time bomb in his pocket.”

Judge Leckie sentenced Dupas to 12 years in prison with a minimum of 10 years before he could apply for parole.

In prison, Dupas underwent medical
treatment to reduce his sex drive. In 1987, while still a prisoner in
Castlemaine Jail, Dupas married a nurse 16 years his senior. A Mont
Park psychiatrist said later, “He believes all of that (his sex
attacks) is behind him since he understands himself better and has
become more assertive.”

Castlemaine Jail

Released on March 3, 1992, after
serving exactly seven years, Dupas lay low for 18 months. On September
23, 1993, he attacked a 15-year-old girl who was horse-riding at
Kyneton. Fortunately, the girl had the common sense to put her horse
between herself and the attacking Dupas, and she escaped unscathed.
Dupas escaped unidentified.

On January 3 at 11:30 a.m., Dupas
attacked a 26-year-old bank teller who was spending the weekend with
her fiancé and three friends at a holiday house near Lake Eppalock in
northwestern Victoria, as she sat on the toilet in a public restroom.
Dupas burst into the cubicle wearing a hood with eye-holes and pointing
a knife at the woman’s face.

Dupas kept yelling for the woman to turn
around and face the wall, but she resisted. The woman was cut badly on
the hands as she fought to prevent her attacker from dragging her out
of the toilet cubicle. Thwarted, Dupas abruptly stopped the attack, let
the woman go and calmly walked away to his car.

As Dupas sped off the woman identified
him to her fiancé — an off-duty Australian Federal Police officer —
who, with friends, chased the station wagon before overpowering Dupas
after his car ran off into the bush on a dirt road.

Australian Federal Police Patch

Police found a roll of insulation
tape and a pair of metal handcuffs in Dupas’ pockets. In his car they
found a grisly cache of the tools of trade of a well-prepared traveling
rapist: knives, a black balaclava, condoms, a roll of sticking plaster
and — chillingly — a sheet of plastic and a shovel.

And Violence Begets Murder

Despite what police saw as Dupas’
meticulous planning of what would be a sexual abduction, murder and
concealment of the body, disappointed prosecutors told Judge Leo Hart
that they did not have enough evidence to sustain a charge of attempted
rape against Dupas and, unfortunately, charges would have to be
reduced to the much lesser charge of false imprisonment.

It was a bitter blow to police and the
prosecution. Under recently introduced Victorian legislation designed
to deal more severely with serial sex offenders, they could have put
Dupas away for an indefinite period where he couldn’t harm any more
innocent women.

But seeing as the prosecution didn’t
have the likelihood of getting a sexual conviction and risked the
prospect of having to let Dupas get away with no conviction at all,
instead, Judge Hart could only proceed with the matter presented before
him, and sentenced Dupas to just three years and nine months jail with
a minimum of two years and nine months after he pleaded guilty to
false imprisonment.

During the proceedings the court had
been told that the woman Dupas attacked and tried to abduct was still
too scared to even walk down the passage from her bedroom to the toilet
at night.

Dupas served the full minimum term and
was released on September 29, 1996, to find his wife had left him. He
got a job as a factory worker and lived for a short time in an
apartment in Rose Street Brunswick. Later, he moved in with a woman,
who knew nothing of his background, in Coanne Street, Pascoe Vale, near
a busy Cumberland Road shopping area.

Margaret Maher

On October 4, 1997, a local
prostitute and recovering heroin addict, 40-year-old Margaret Maher,
who shopped at Pascoe Vale regularly, was abducted and murdered.
Maher’s body was found in long grass on industrial land near Cliffords
Road, Somerton. Maher had been stabbed many times and her breasts had
been grotesquely mutilated.

Four weeks later, on November 1, 1997,
Mersina Halvagis, 25, was repeatedly stabbed and left to die between
graves as she was laying flowers on the grave of her grandmother in the
nearby Fawkner Cemetery. By a strange coincidence, the grave of Peter
Dupas’ grandfather is buried at Fawkner Cemetery, only 100 yards away
from where Halvagis was murdered.

Mersina Halvagis

At 6:30 a.m. on New Year’s Eve,
1997, Kathleen Downes, a frail 95-year-old who had suffered two strokes
and had difficulty in walking, was found stabbed to death in her room
at Brunswick Lodge nursing home, where she had lived for eight years.
Detectives established that phone calls were made from Dupas’ Pascoe
Vale home to the Brunswick nursing home in the weeks before Mrs.
Downes’ death. They were unable to establish any previous link between
the two addresses or any reason for the calls to have been made.

At around 6 p.m. on April 19, 1999, Rena
Hoffman called on her friend Nicole Patterson at her Northcote home in
Westgarth for tea. Hoffman became concerned when she couldn’t get a
response, so she entered the house — where Patterson worked from home as
consulting psychotherapist — to find her friend dead on her consulting
room floor.

The Evidence Points to Dupas

Patterson was naked from the waist down.
Her clothes had been ripped and cut. “I saw Nicky arranged naked and
there was blood near her, not actually on her,” Hoffman told police.
“She seemed cleaned up or something.”

An autopsy revealed that 28-year-old
Nicole Patterson had been dead since that morning. She had been stabbed
27 times. There were numerous defensive wounds to both her hands. It
was impossible to say if she had been raped. Both of Patterson’s
breasts had been sliced off and were nowhere to be found at the murder
scene. Patterson’s mutilations were similar to those of Margaret Maher,
who was murdered on October 4, 1997.

Margaret Maher

Patterson’s neighbor heard a woman
scream at 9:30 a.m. and another witness heard two shouts around about
the same time. Another neighbor said he heard “a scream of pain, not
fear” and about 10 minutes later, he saw a man walking with “a sort of
intentness” from the direction of Patterson’s house.

The killer had been thorough. He had
cleaned up after himself. There were no fingerprints or footprints. It
looked as though the house had been wiped down and it appeared as if
the killer had scoured the premises to see if he had left any clues. He
had even taken Patterson’s purse containing her driver’s license and
her mobile phone.

But the killer had missed the most
incriminating piece of evidence. Under clothing on the lounge,
detectives found Patterson’s appointment book. It contained a 9 a.m.
appointment for a “Malcolm” that morning and a mobile phone number
written next to it.

“Malcolm” turned out to be a student who
had no idea who Patterson was. “Had he given out his phone number to
anyone recently?” the police asked. He had, and gave police a list. One
of the names he was doing a bit of handy work for, Peter Dupas, came
up on the computer.

Police put what they had together.
Patterson advertised her business for clients in the local papers, so
it wouldn’t be hard to get into her house. Her killer had made an
appointment under a false name for that morning using a false mobile
phone number to avoid detection. What he didn’t count on was police
finding the appointment book.

Peter Norris Dupas

When police raided Dupas’ home —
which was less than 30 minutes from where Patterson was murdered —
three days after the murder, Dupas had a fingernail scratch on his
face. A search of the premises uncovered a bloodstained green jacket in
a bundle of clothing in a workshop cupboard. DNA testing showed that
there was less than one in a 6.5 billion chance that the blood in 13 of
the 14 drops on the jacket did not belong to Patterson. The other drop
was Dupas’ blood mixed with Patterson’s.

Investigators found a black balaclava and a page out of the Herald Sun
with a report of the murder on it. The photo of Nicole Patterson in the
article had been slashed. In Dupas’ garbage bin, police found torn-up
pieces of newspaper and when the pieces were put together, they formed a
handwritten note with the words “nine o’clock Nicci,” and “Malcolm”
written on it. Police also confirmed that on the day of the killing,
Dupas was caught on video buying gas near Patterson’s home.

A Cruel & Pointless Death

Nicole Patterson

Despise the mountain of
circumstantial evidence, Dupas denied any knowledge of Patterson’s
death, saying only that the police must have planted the evidence on
him in order to get a conviction. Peter Dupas was charged with the
murder of Nicole Patterson and remanded in custody for trial.

To her family and friends and anyone who
had even been remotely in touch with her throughout her life, Nicole
Patterson’s death was cruel and pointless. Nicole didn’t have an enemy
in the world. Of all of the things that an attractive, athletic and
intelligent young woman could have done with her life, she chose
psychotherapy and dedicated much her time helping young people with
drug problems.

In her spare time Nicole worked as a
youth counselor at the Ardoch Centre, an organization which endeavors
to assist homeless or disadvantaged young people. She also assisted in
activities associated with the Australia Drug Foundation.

Nicole’s life was her work, her partner
of 20 months, Richard Smith, and her beloved dog, Bella, which she had
rescued from an animal shelter. Her sister Kylie said of Nicole, “She
was the most beautiful person I’ve known and she had a lot of special
gifts that not many people have.”

Early in 1999, Nicole decided to extend
her practice and set up the front bedroom of her home as a consulting
room and advertised for clients in the local papers.

Putting the pieces together,
investigators believed that the man calling himself “Malcolm” made the
first of 15 phone calls to her on March 3 and eventually made an
appointment for 9 a.m. April 19 on the pretext that he wanted to consult
her about his chronic gambling problem.

Police believed that after Dupas arrived
at 9 a.m., he was ushered into the consulting room and attacked Nicole
as she was making coffee for them both. Dupas set upon her, stabbing
her viciously and repeatedly with a knife he had brought with him. But
Nicole put up strong resistance, as was indicated by the shouting heard
by the neighbors and the cuts to her hands.

Once he had murdered Nicole, Dupas set
about fastidiously cleaning the room up and removing any clues that may
have led to him. Then he took his souvenirs — Nicole’s purse and her
body parts. But, fortunately for investigators, he missed the diary
that led them straight to his door.

A Just Sentence

Supreme Court of Victoria

At his trial held at the Supreme
Court of Victoria before Justice Frank Vincent in August 2000, Dupas,
who described his occupation as a part-time furniture maker, told the
court that all of the evidence must have been planted by police because
he had never been to Nicole Patterson’s Northcote home. He said that
if Patterson’s blood was on his jacket, then it must have been planted
there by police. He said that he did not have anything to do with
Patterson after April 12, 1999, when he cancelled an appointment to see
her about his gambling problem.

Justice Frank Vincent

Dupas said he did not contact
Patterson on April 19, the day she was murdered, or go anywhere near
her house. He said that he only left his Pascoe Vale home on that day
to by milk and petrol, to do some shopping and to pick up his de-facto
wife. Dupas said that while he was at home, he was washing clothes and
other gear in readiness for a camping trip and working on a cocktail
cabinet in his shed.

David Brustman, acting for Dupas, told
the court that there were issues about how his client’s jacket came to
have blood on it and whether the jacket proved anything. But there was
no issue, he said, that 13 of the stains had Patterson’s blood and that
the 14th a combination of her blood and that of Dupas.

“On the face of it, game, set and
match,” Brustman told the jury, adding that the issue was not whether
Dupas or someone else had done it. He said that the issue was: Did he
make an appointment and not keep it, or keep it in the most horrible
way?

In cross-examining Dupas, prosecutor
Geoff Horgan pointed out that it must have been an amazing coincidence
that out of all of the jackets Dupas had in his home, the police
sprinkled the deceased’s blood on the one he was wearing the day she
was killed. Horgan suggested that if this were the case, then the
police must have carried around a vial of Nicole Patterson’s
uncongealed blood for two days in order to sprinkle it on the jacket on
the day that he was arrested.

The Halvagis family

On August 17, 2000, after two and a
half hours of deliberations, the jury returned a guilty verdict. At
Dupas’ sentencing hearing on August 23, 2000, Justice Vincent told him,
“I note that you have an appalling criminal history involving repeated
acts of sexual violence and which extends over approximately 30 years.
You have admitted 16 prior convictions involving six court appearances
between March 27, 1972, and November 11, 1994

“All of the offences were sexually
related or motivated. A number of them involved physical violence and
the use of a knife. On three separate occasions you were sentenced to
terms of imprisonment for the commission of rape, aggravated assault or
assault with intent to rape.

Peter Norris Dupas

“On the second and third of these
occasions, you committed your offenses within a very short time of your
release from custody. It appears that the only periods during which
you were at large in the community without committing offenses were two
periods of approximately 12 months each, during which you were subject
to strict parole conditions following your release from prison in 1992
and 1996.

“However, it was not long after that
form of control was lifted by the expiration of the sentence to which
it was related that you reverted to your usual type of criminal
behavior.”

“You regarded Nicole Patterson as
nothing more than prey to be entrapped and killed. Her life, youth and
personal qualities assumed importance in your mind only by reason of
the sense of satisfaction and power you experienced in taking them from
her.”

“At a fundamental level, as human
beings, you present for us the awful, threatening and unanswerable
question — how did you come to be as you are?”

Justice Frank Vincent sentenced Peter
Norris Dupas to be imprisoned for the rest of his natural life without
the opportunity for release on parole.

Mersina Halvagis

Peter Dupas has since been questioned
about the unsolved murders of Margaret Maher, Mersina Halvagis, Helen
McMahon and Kathleen Downes. He has denied any involvement.

2 comments:

Watch out for psychopaths they are everywhere even in your own family...wolves dressed in sheep's clothing....don`t be fool run don`t walk away.....they will torcher and destroy your life for their own pleasure.....